Introductory drawing course motivates artistic illustration

Mark Batongmalaque, adjunct art professor, teaches a beginning drawing class with a slick sense of humor along with a passionate personality to lecture students on the arts.

Like all undergraduate students, Jacob Campbell, freshman business major, said he needs to take an arts class in order to fulfill his degree requirements, but said he saw Batongmalaque’s beginning drawing class as an opportunity to enhance his work in the competitive field of marketing.

“I am taking this class as a general education requirement, but I love drawing,” Campbell said. “Marketing entails a little bit of drawing, so maybe down the road I could do both. I have been drawing independently on my own time.”

When Batongmalaque began his class, he rearranged the chairs and tables of the classroom to make way for easels and stools to be spread out across the Rose Church Arts Building.

The setup was complete with a light nestled atop the ceiling fixtures as more students
began to file in the classroom over time.

“Beginning drawing is the main focus during the fall semester,” Batongmalaque said. “We got a lot of students interested in picking up a general education class. That’s a staple in this department is having a lot of beginning drawing sections.

“The more advanced classes get offered more in the spring for people working on their senior exhibition work.”

Batongmalaque usheredstudents to the board, where he began teaching them about how to draw a cylinder, complete with shading. Students quickly returned to their canvas.

“A vase is basically a warped cylinder, it flairs out and it pinches in,” he said in reference to a vase on his table.

Timothy Koo, freshman biology major, is a science student in the class.

“It’s definitely a lot different than my other classes,” Koo said. “It’s a lot more interactive.It’s not just that you are drawing, you also think about what you are going to do.”

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